Elpida has asked the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to investigate Hynix. So have four Taiwanese memory makers, including Nanya, who this week asked their government to probe the troubled South Korean memory maker.
All five companies have been spurred to action by the apparent success Infineon and Micron …

Intel confirmed today that it plans to investing $100 million in Japanese DRAM maker Elpida.
The real deal is that the two companies will align their DRAM development plans allowing them to co-create "new DRAM architectures". For that, read 'DDR 2', which Intel plans to implement in its server chipsets next year, and so wants …

Elpida has warned that its FY2004 income will fall below its previous expectations on the back of a drop in sales - and the decision to set aside funds against possible fines for its alleged participation in a price-fixing cartel.
The Japanese memory chip maker said on 24 January that full-year sales would total ¥211-214bn ($1. …

Memory maker Elpida today formally announced its intention to IPO, having been granted permission to do so from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The share offering will take place 15 November and is set to raise around ¥108bn ($990m), based on an anticipated share price of ¥3400 ($31). Some 29.15m new shares will be issued, with a …

Memory maker Elpida has licensed Rambus' Yellowstone high-bandwidth interface technology, the pair announced today.
Elpida joins Sony and Toshiba as Yellowstone licensees. Sony and Toshiba are believed to want the technology for the Playstation 3. Elpida wants it for its high-end offerings.
Rambus expects the first Yellowstone …

Elpida has introduced a pair of performance promoting techniques designed to reduce the time it takes DRAM chips to provide data requested by the host desktop, notebook, server or other devices.
Technique one essentially extends the bus headroom in Elpida's 1Gb chips and allows them to operate as both DDR 1 and DDR 2 parts, …

Down-on-its-luck semiconductor biz Renesas Electronics announced today the first step of a rumoured restructuring plan that's believed to include 12,000 job cuts.
Reports over the weekend suggested that Renesas could axe employees and look for a helping hand of up to ¥100bn ($1.3bn, £803m). The Japanese microcontroller maker is …

Memory maker Elpida has announced the first GDDR2-M memory chips for notebook graphics systems.
ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600, announced yesterday, will be the first graphics part to support GDDR2-M, which is a variant of regular DDR 2 SDRAM. ATI co-developed the new memory technology.
GDDR2-M is designed to cut memory chip power …

Memory makers Elpida and Micron have asked Japan's Ministry of Finance to impose punitive duties on rival manufacturer Hynix.
Hynix said Japan's investigation is "particularly unreasonable and unwarranted at this time, when the world DRAM market has been showing a continued strong performance since 2003, and when the WTO is …

Update
Elpida has finally figured out how to do DDR 2 SDRAM for Intel servers, the company announced this past Friday. It said its 512Mb 533Mbps DDR2 chips has passed all of Intel's tests and would be available to be used in Intel servers next year.
The memory is likely to be used in Intel's upcoming server chipsets Twin Castle and …

Fans fed up of broken iPhone screens will be pleased to hear that the new model, the iPhone 5, makes it much easier to replace the glass panel placed on top of the smartphone's display.
So say the gadget deconstructionists at iFixit.com after getting hold of the handset this morning Down Under.
iFixit.com iPhone 5 takeapart …

Elpida will be the last major Japanese DRAM maker, after buying Mitsubishi Electric's DRAM business.
First, it's taking over the sales operation and then - no date fixed yet, but it has to be before March, when the purchase is to complete - it's taking on the Mitsubishi products, intellectual property concerning manufacturing …

Elpida Memory, the joint venture between NEC and Hitachi, has followed Samsung and signed up to license Rambus' SDRAM and DDR SDRAM patents.
Samsung signed yesterday. Like the Samsung agreement, Elpida's licence will involve the payment of royalties to Rambus which are, in Rambus' words, "greater than the RDRAM compatible rates …

Hands up who thought Samsung was the world's leading flash shipper? Well, according to a Micron VP, it is his company that's the biggest shipper of NAND flash in the business, bigger than both Samsung and Hynix.
Micron makes DRAM, NAND and NOR flash chips. Kipp Bedard, Micron's investor relations VP, told the Raymond James 34th …

Elpida has begun shipping the latest generation of its mobile-specific Mobile RAM memory chips aimed at PDAs, digital cameras, cellphones and other small form-factor devices.
The 256Mb parts come in single data rate SDRAM and 400MHz DDR SDRAM flavours and are fabbed at 0.11 micron. The chips are 90 per cent of the size of …

Elpida, the chip maker formed from the merged semiconductor operations of NEC and Hitachi, has announced it will build a ¥180 billion fab to churn out 0.13 micron 256Mb DRAM chips.
The company's plans emerged even as Korean chip vendors become increasingly worried that the chip market is slowing down.
Elpida's new plant will …

Elpida's DDR sales will have caught up with RDRAM shipments by the end of the year and will overtake them during the first three months of 2002, the memory maker said yesterday.
Elpida reckons that by the end of 2001, DDR and RDRAM will each account for 15 per cent of the company's memory sales, based on preliminary orders for …

Micron is going deeper into enterprise data centre SSD arena with its launch of a SAS version of its P400M SATA interface solid state disk. The mixture is pretty much as before - apart from the 6-gig SAS interface.
The new P410M comes in 100, 200 and 400GB capacity points and uses the same 25nm NAND as the P400. It has the same …

Elpida Memory, previously known as NEC-Hitachi Memory, has announced the first silicon for memory products based on the 0.13 micron geometry.
The design process began back in April this year and the first samples of the 0.13 -micron 256Mb DRAM are expected in January 2001. Development of other high density SDRAM and DDR SDRAM …

Electron microscope photos of an Apple A6 processor lifted out of an iPhone 5 confirm the presence of a dual-core ARM CPU within the system-on-a-chip plus a trio of Imagination Technologues PowerVR graphics cores.
The SoC was pulled from the handset by the team at iFixit.com, and the die extracted from its ceramic package and …

Memory and flash fab operator Micron has reported disappointing results for its fourth fiscal 2012 quarter and the full year.
The basic revenue stats are quarterly revenues of a straight $2 billion, $172 million down on the previous quarter and $140 million down on the year ago quarter. Micron, headquartered in Boise, made a net …

The numbers are straightforward. In its second financial 2012 quarter, ending 1 March, DRAM and NAND maker Micron sold $2.1bn of chips and SSDs and made a loss of $224m. This reflects the deepening of a trend that has been underway for seven quarters, with declining revenues and falling profits turning into losses.
If you have a …

DRAM and NAND chip supplier Micron has recorded its sixth loss-making quarter with revenues the lowest they have been for almost three years. How long can this go on?
Revenues in the first fiscal 2013 quarter plunged to $1.8bn, 14.6 per cent lower than a year ago and 10 per cent down on the previous quarter. Micron declared a …

Toshiba, the world's second-biggest NAND chip-maker, has announced a 30 per cent cut in flash memory chip production today to respond to market oversupply, declining prices and losses at the firm.
Toshiba is the last of Japan's big chipmakers after Elpida Memory – which had been Japan's only DRAM flash maker – filed for …

Ailing Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics is set to receive a ¥200bn (£1.6bn) investment boost to help prop up the company, the majority of which will come from the government, according to new reports from the Far East.
The state-backed Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) will plough around ¥150bn (£1.2bn) in for …

Samsung reckons it's in line for a record quarterly operating profit after Apple's reduced orders for chips and screens seem to have failed to make a dent in the South Korean business.
The fruity firm is clearly hoping to hamper or just distance itself from the South Korean firm by unwinding their long partnership as their …

Apple is scaling back its purchase of tablet LCD displays from Samsung's display wing, in what looks like another clear sign that Cupertino wants to reduce its dependence on the Korean giant in the wake of their recent acrimonious patent battles.
Stats from market-watcher DisplaySearch seen by the Korea Times revealed that …

Teardown
Google's latest Asus-built Nexus 7 fondleslab may be smaller, slimmer, and lighter than the old version, but the Chocolate Factory hasn't sacrificed reparability for the sake of miniaturization.
Photo showing how to open the Nexus 7 case All that's needed to open the Nexus 7 case is one plastic tool, and all the fasteners …

Apple has cut down its order of memory chips from Samsung, reducing its reliance on its smartphone rival for components, say supply chain sources cited by Reuters.
The iPhone 5, widely expected to be announced next week, will feature fewer Samsung components than its predecessors, say the sources.
The newswire speculated that …

Comment
The hottest enterprise flash products company these days is SanDisk, and it has a great chance of becoming the most important non-volatile memory supplier of all – the EMC of enterprise flash.
There are four basic reasons:
It has a thriving and growing enterprise flash business
It has bought Fusion-io in May giving it a …

Chip behemoth Samsung has decided to sink $7bn into its first memory factory in China, which will build NAND products.
The South Korean biz said in a regulatory filing that it will spend $2.3bn initially setting up the production facility and add the rest over the next several years.
The factory, located in Xi'an, will start …

Hynix is switching production at a memory plant in China to churn out NAND flash instead of DRAM chips.
Digitimes reports that the plant at Wuxi in China will make the flash switch to help Hynix become more profitable – and perhaps to start catching up with NAND flash market leaders Samsung and Toshiba. Hynix is currently ahead …

This week is turning out to be a massive raft of storage news. Ready for the deluge? Here we go:
In the flash galaxy, astronomers have discovered a Micron cluster formed from little flashes of light:
Flash cache software supplier VeloBit has a sampling programme with Micron, the memory chip fryer. Customers get a bundled …

PCs could cost more in the months ahead because memory will be in short supply.
The iSuppli trackers reckon that DRAM supply could undershoot demand because some manufacturers won't be able to get the semiconductor lithography tools they need.
They note that ASML Holdings NV, the main supplier, should be able to supply 33 …

The European Commission has fined ten memory chip makers a total of €331m - as part of the first settlement made for cartel charges.
Ten chipmakers were found guilty of running a cartel in order to fix prices. The fine was cut by ten per cent in recognition of the companies' acceptance of the facts.
Micron had its fine …

Memory prices surged in Far East trading today amid unease over how Japan's fab industry will be affected by Friday's earthquake and tsunami and resulting power problems.
Chip markets had effectively closed on Friday when the quake struck, with prices generally static or down.
However, according to DRAMeXchange, spot prices for …

Goliath just got bigger; Samsung expanded its lead at the top of the DRAM market last quarter, shipping more memory than anyone else and at prices above the industry average.
Analyst house iSuppli characterised the quarter as one of explosive DRAM growth and said it was the best second quarter for fifteen years. The overall DRAM …

It looks like Advanced Micro Devices is first to market with support for load reduced DIMM DDR3 main memory for x86 and quite possibly all kinds of servers, and is trotting out Inphi, the maker of the isolation memory buffer chip that is at the heart of this technology.
With LRDIMM memory, you take out the register on a DDR3 …

The chip heads at market watcher IHS iSuppli have tallied the sales figures for the world's semiconductor makers for 2011, and guess what? Intel won while just about everybody else, with a few notable exceptions, lost some ground.
iSuppli said in a statement that worldwide chip revenues rose by 1.3 per cent in 2011, to $311.4bn …

We're hitting a memory wall, if you didn't know, and processor cores are going to be held up because DRAM can't scale up enough or ship 'em data fast enough. Samsung and Micron aim to fix that with 3D memory cubes and a consortium to define an interface spec for them.
Samsung and Micron, asserting that existing 2D DRAM …

DRAM manufacturer Elpida hopes the DRAM market will be healthier next year when a severe two year slump ends.
Elpida, Japan's only DRAM vendor, made a $144m operating loss in its first fiscal 2009 quarter which finished at the end of June. It thinks it will post another thumping $144m operating loss for its second fiscal 2009 …

The market watching wizards at Gartner have taken another gaze in the crystal ball, and after some buffing and polishing have decided that the outlook for the semiconductor industry in 2012 is a bit better than they had expected as 2011 came to a close.
According to the latest forecast, Gartner now expects for global chip sales …

Extreme Hardware
Reducing the size of chips has benefits beyond those seen in CPUs and GPUs. One other key component to gain an advantage is memory.
The specification of the next generation of memory module, DDR 4 (DDR stands for 'double data rate'), is currently being finalised ahead of its anticipated launch later this year. It will use less …

"You over-charged us. We want triple damages." That's the essence of an Oracle lawsuit against Micron, filed last Friday in San Jose.
As reported by Bloomberg, Oracle, the well-known touchy-feely company, claims Micron over-charged it when its acquired Sun business bought some $2bn of DRAM chips in the 1998 - 2002 period.
In …

Comment
In the face of a foundry chip glut and recession-induced demand slump the world's semi-conductor industry is experiencing shock and disruption with moves afoot for government aid, mergers and a bankruptcy.
The Japanese Nikkei newspaper reports that Japan-based Elpida is going to combine with three Taiwan-based semi-conductor …

The new Xeon E5 processors from Intel pack considerable oomph, but if you want to squeeze the most performance out of them, particularly in virtualized server environments doing real transaction processing and web front-end workloads, you have to remember the oldest bit of advice for the systems racket: don't skimp on the main …

Blocks and Files
STEC is touting its great CellCare flash endurance, and it is great, reinforcing a view that it and OCZ make natural flash market buy-in points for Seagate and Western Digital.
Whoa, hang on a minute, where did that idea come from?
Let's start from the point that the key future flash technology is the ability to lengthen the …

The Taiwanese government says it will bail out six indigenous DRAM memory makers and mere them into a new entity called Taiwan Memory Company, confirming months of speculation. Government officials are pursuing partnerships with either an American or Japanese chip maker, or perhaps both.
The announcement of the formation of the …

Almost a year to the day after a huge earthquake and devastating tsunami rattled the north-east corner of Japan, crippling the supply chain of key technologies, the production at some components plants is reportedly still not back to 100 per cent while some tech firms are accelerating their plans to leave the archipelago.
The …